Joao Carvalho's Death Stirs Up Old Dispute Over What to Do About MMA in Ireland

Following the death of Portuguese mixed martial artist Joao Carvalho on Monday after his knockout loss at a TEF event at the National Stadium in Dublin two days prior, the Irish media and the Irish government are once more at loggerheads with each other and themselves over the role that MMA should play in Irish life.

Those managing to keep their cool in the face of tragedy focused their reactions on sympathy and shared humanity and the need for stronger regulations on MMA in Ireland, a country whose ambivalent relationship with the sport seems only to have grown more heated with the rise of native son and UFC superstar Conor McGregor and now the death of a fighter on their soil.

To his everlasting credit, McGregor, who trains with Charlie Ward, Carvalho's opponent last Saturday night, and was in the audience supporting him when the fight took place, took to Facebook yesterday to write a letter honoring the Portuguese fighter while at the same time defending the sport that killed him against the inevitable opportunistic condemnation of the moralizing class.

"It is easy for those on the outside to criticise our way of living, but for the millions of people around the world who have had their lives, their health, their fitness and their mental strength all changed for the better through combat, this is truly a bitter pill to swallow," McGregor wrote. "We have lost one of us. I hope we remember Joao as a champion, who pursued his dream doing what he loved, and show him the eternal respect and admiration he deserves."

Meanwhile Ireland's Minister of State Tourism and Sport, Michael Ring, began calling for the regulation of MMA almost immediately after it was announced that Carvalho had died. Currently professional fighters and promotions are encouraged to gain approval from a group called SAFE MMA—whose requirements for approval include blood testing and pre- and post-fight medical assessments for fighters and "appropriately qualified cageside medics and paramedics" for events—but the sport remains unregulated in Ireland.

Yesterday Ring told RTE Radio 1, "Clearly there's a problem … This particular sport is not regulated, has not looked for regulation and has not looked to be part of the Sport Ireland program. They are not getting any funding from the state. … If there's any other major sporting event in the country, there's national governing bodies. Whoever is hosting that event has to comply with those safety standards and we need to bring in some kind of regulation to deal with this new phenomenon."

Unfortunately not everyone can be reasonable or decent (or at least resigned to the fact of MMA), so rather that Carvalho's death becoming the opportunity for unanimity in the quest for government regulation, it instead just seems to have amplified the gap between those in favor of regulated MMA and those who believe no rules or regulations could ever wash away the inhuman brutality at the heart of the sport. Following Carvalho's death this anti-MMA faction smelled blood and began falling over themselves to be seen as the strongest proponents for an all-out ban on the sport, using the unfortunate, and extraordinarily rare, instance of a mixed martial artist dying as a result of injuries incurred in a fight as an opportunity to turn their hand-wringing and personal preferences into matters of high, even inarguable, morality.

Johnny Watterson, a columnist with the Irish Times, spared no poetry or indignation in decrying the Carvalho fight, and particularly its last few seconds of unanswered ground-and-pound from Carvalho's opponent, as a "calamitous and indefensible episode" in Irish sporting history.

"It is that aspect of the sport, one man struggling and helpless on the canvas and the other on top punching him again and again and again that makes it less a privilege of watching talented athletes and more an episode of cage pornography," Watterson wrote. "It brings people into a world that is more closely associated with assault and violence than any other sport including the regular whipping boy, professional boxing."

Watterson finished his column by calling Carvalho's death a "legal killing."

Meanwhile, ramping up the panic even more was Professor Tim Lynch, consulting neurologist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in North Dublin, who was able to see beyond Johnny Watterson's moral distaste for ground-and-pound to conclude that the whole aim of MMA, its very reason for being, is to destroy the human brain.

Speaking on Newstalk's Breakfast Show this morning, Professor Lynch, who is a doctor, said, "I find it abhorrent that you'd be having any sport where the point is trying to hit and knock the player out and cause brain damage."

So would we.